Designing the Reliant
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan would give Trekkers the first Starfleet ship beside the original Enterprise. (Or, more accurately, the Constitution class.) But that wasn’t the original plan.
In early versions of the scrip, the Reliant was a sister ship of the Enterprise. Production Designer Joseph Jennings worried this would make it hard for viewers to distinguish between the two ships during the battle in the Mutara Nebula. “In the dogfight you had to instantly recognize which ship you were looking at, so they had to look different,” he told Star Trek: The Magazine in 2002.
At the same time, you had to make them look like they came from the same culture and had the same technology.
Jennings worked with Lee Cole and Mike Minor to design the new vessel. “It was the first time a new starship had been designed since the Klingon battle cruiser,” he remembered.
She was supposed to be a coastal and geodetic survey ship, like a buoy tender. She would be armed, perhaps, but only lightly. She wasn’t a lion ship like the Enterprise. Also, remember the Enterprise was always supposed to be an exploratory vessel where the armament was secondary. That was even more true for the Reliant. She was supposed to just stick around in the known universe and take care of things that everybody already knew about.
The three came up with a compressed version of the Enterprise.
We had long postulated that the circular saucer said, “This is Starfleet navy,” and it used engines that looked pretty much like those on the Enterprise.
They eliminated the engineering hull and attached the nacelles to an extended saucer section instead.
Upside down
Except the nacelles looked over the saucer in their design. Cole remembered how they ended up underneath.
Harve Bennett, the movie’s producer, was working abroad before they started filming Star Trek II. “We were mailing everything over to him and getting him to approve it and mail it back to us,” Cold told Star Trek: The Magazine, “so we did our first sketch of the ship and mailed them off to him.” Bennett was supposed to sign for approval at the bottom of the sheet.
When he got it in the mail, he took it out of the package upside down, I guess, and wrote out on the bottom, “Yes, this looks very good, proceed.” So when we got it back, we realized he’d approved it upside down.
Rather than bother Bennett again, the three decided to make it work that way, and it did. Jennings and Lee added what Minor dubbed a “roll bar” to support the dropped nacelles. Phaser banks were put in this supporting structure.
Models
Two models were built at Industrial Light and Magic. Visual Effects Supervisor Kenneth Ralston told Cinefantastique in 1982,
The ship takes the best of the Enterprise, rearranges it, and adds a few goodies of its own.
In a separate interview with American Cinematographer, he recalled that the model was “perfectly constructed for shooting. It’s light,” he said, “highly detailed, non-reflective and could be easily mounted from all sides for any possible setup.”
Robert Diepenbrock, who worked at ILM at the time, told Forgotten Trek in February 2020 that the large Reliant was built in the same scale as the Enterprise. The small Reliant matched the larger version “in every detail and was used in forced-perspective and wide-effects shots.”
The high quality and scale of the large model allowed it to be reused many times in episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. It was not until its appearance in the second television series that the class name, Miranda, was confirmed on screen.
It also showed several ships of the type without the “roll bar”. The reason was that the effects crew were unable to make its internal lighting work on time.
An extensive refit was done for the episode “Cause and Effect”. The model was redressed to represent the USS Bozeman of the Soyuz starship class. The modifications were designed by Greg Jein and Mike Okuda but not permanently affixed to the model, allowing it to reappear as the Miranda-class USS Saratoga in the pilot of Deep Space Nine, “Emissary”.
Miranda ships that appeared in later episodes of Deep Space Nine and Voyager were CGI models, also created by ILM.
21 comments
Submit comments by email.